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Many of you still enjoy CryptoQuip, which came out in March 2009, almost 6 years ago. Well, we’re excited to announce that we’re working on an update that will make this game feel brand new! In addition to updating to take advantage of iOS8 features it will:

Improve the visual design and usability

New Puzzles

Brand new turn based “with Friends” mode for those who want to play socially!

We haven’t yet set a target release date , but we will keep updating this site as we get closer. Please send us feedback. Now is the time!

For the past year one of the 2 principals from surje has been putting apps aside to work on a textbook on the fundamentals of web development. If you’ve noticed things slow down that’s why.

Well, it’s finally here, after over a year of really hard work Ricardo, and his colleague Randy Connolly have finally finished the book and it’s available on Amazon.The book is intended for multiple course stream in web development, and teaches web development concepts using a LAMP stack and a range of technology including HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, jQuery, Bootstrap, DNS, Twitter, Facebook.

There are still some materials left to complete such as lab manuals, powerpoint slides and some sample exams (and solutions), but soon, apps will be back on the front burner. Maybe another game, a Robert’s Rules app or something else (that Facebook can buy

We used to use the built in dictionary that comes with iOS, but as of iOS6 that dictionary was REALLLLLYY SSSLLLLOOOOOWWWWW. It appears to be missing completely from iOS7, so we made our move.

The new version replaces the old dictionary with a new one, and as a result all versions of the game run fast now, as it was originally intended. I think this is the best game we make, and now it really is (again).

As a side note – that was the fastest review EVER!!!! Submitted on Tuesday approved and for sale by Thursday! Sweet!

So if you want to see what all the fuss is about download it right away, play it, and then see how the update is way better!

Even though we’re all super busy around here, it only made sense to try new iOS 7 update from Apple.

It’s the first time the UI changed in a long time and we’re excited to see how our apps fare. I’m just updated my development phone as I write this and so far I’m pretty psyched.

The UI really has changed since iOS6, with new animations for transitions and a clean new look. I especially like how my lock screen is uncluttered and has a flashlight and calculator built in !! The subtle changes tot he UI I notice are great. The emergency phone button has moved for example, although I must say some of the flat elements make it look a little… flat I guess. Personal taste I’m sure.

Look for some new stuff from us around the winter holidays, we’re knee deep in other awesome projects, but will be back with some new apps, including perhaps the greatest meeting app ever (for some sub-populations).

I’ll try and post again soon, but in the meantime I hope everyone enjoys this nice weather.

We have a new client is a local mom who posts about our neighborhood. YYCMom.com shares her opinions on all things related to shopping, stores and living in Calgary as a Mom. It’s actually quite fun to read so far.

It’s really easy to use wordpress, and having a mom blogging about mom type things validates that anyone can manage and run a website with the right support (i.e. us)

Every year at this time, people are frantically looking for fun games to relax with over the holiday. We here at Surje aim to please and are summarizing some of our best Holiday games for the season.

Santa’s Loot is a Free physics based game where you collect gifts on Santa’s sled. This will be the 2nd year that Santa’s Loot is available for download on your iOS device and it’s better than ever. We’ve updated it to work on iPhone5 and we hope you enjoy balancing those gifts.

For those of us less interested in Santa themed games I want to recommend our best selling word Games CryptoQuip and CryptoQuip Free. Like the newspaper puzzle, you have to solve a puzzle where each letter is replaced with another. Unlike the newspaper though you drag the letters, matches are filled in automatically and the quotes can easily be tweeted.

Finally I suggest the very original and my favorite game Word Slide. In this game you are given a grid full of letters and you slide then both directions to spell words. since we use the built in dictionary there are thousands and thousands of valid words. Make 2 at a time to get bonus multipliers. It’s a real look into your own psyche, since the world you see won’t be the same as the words someone else does…

All these games and our others are a mental word puzzle work out, and are updated for iOS6 and the newest iPhone, if you’re lucky enough to get one over the holidays. We hope everyone enjoys some well earned relaxation over the holidays, hopefully with one of our games in hand

I have a client who insisted on the cheapest hosting possible. Despite my recommendation to go with something else, this client was persuaded to choose HostPapa, and now I have to fix my client’s site. Since the host still hasn’t figured it out I though I’d post a quick and dirty solution here.

Hack

The hack was a script, run from inside the shared hosting package. I won’t post the details here, but it went through all directories and replaced index.php and index.html files with replacements that simply said “hacked by hacker“.

Solution

Replacing those files (index.php , index.html) in your wordpress installation with fresh ones is a good 1st step, but not enough.The hack also sought out the header.php file in your theme directory. (i.e. wp-content/themes/twentyeleven/header.php). That file should be replaced with a fresh one form the wordpress installation package as well.

Voila. Your sites are now up for the time being. Good luck and may the internet have mercy on your domain so long as it’s hosted on a poorly configured host.

I checked our update stats since we released our iOS6 updates and found over 10,000 updates! I interpret that to mean that at least 10,000 downloads of our apps have remained on people’s devices.

There may be 10 thousand people playing our games on a given day. That feels pretty good. I hope you are enjoying our work, and send us bugs and feature requests so we can grow that number.

Although we have nothing in the hopper in the short term, we are patching our apps as needed, and thinking about what we will build next. We may build another game, but more likely will build a meeting productivity app. Stay Tuned…

So rather than fix my poorest performing game I decided to improve my best performing game for iOS6. We submitted updates last night and hope to take advantage of that bigger screen. Cryptoquip is sometimes a little tight, so the extra space is great.

I’m generally frustrated with this update though. Changing how rotations are handled is huge!

I may stop supporting some games since I’d be working for pennies an hour to update them…